EPT
The Level of Competition in ‘National Esports’
For those of you that followed the tournament all of the way through, Alibaba’s goal with a tournament of this calibre was to create a national-level tournament for esports, akin to the Olympics. In theory this is pretty cool, but I think the fact that most Dota teams are not made up of individuals from the same country makes this goal a bit of a pipe dream. While we got to see teams like Alliance, TNC, and Horde perform, it still doesn’t have the hype that other premiere matchups like the EGs and VPs can bring to the stage.
Even from China, you’d think that there would be more teams itching to see if they could get a cut of that $800,000 top prize. Yet, we’re left with relatively unknown teams playing in the qualifiers; teams I didn’t even know existed! For reference, only 2 of the teams that participated in the Chinese qualifier have Liquipedia pages and one of them didn’t even make it out of the groups. Where were the Chinese players in a hometown event with a good sized purse? Allegedly, ACE had a hand in making sure that this would be the case, but why?
I can only speculate here, but my guess is the timings didn’t pan out due to several events surrounding the qualifiers and main event. DPL, MDL, ESL and DAC qualifiers come to mind as well as preparation for the Boston Major. We saw teams dropping from Dreamleague for similar reasons and DreamHack is already a well-known, prestigious league so this wouldn’t be too far-fetched. While some think that the prize pool was encroaching on their own domestic tournament offerings, it is far more likely that the DAC qualifier timing played a huge part into this.
Timing concerns aside, compare this style to individual esports like Starcraft and Hearthstone and you see the differences in the quality of matchups. Having a TY vs Maru Grand Final was pretty much something any Starcraft fan would be happy to watch. Even the Hearthstone playoffs were full of players that a noob like myself was able to recognize and be happy with! For 1v1 esports (and with the use of qualifier events, of course) I think that this style of tournament is different and great! Not all tournaments should be the same, so to see one with a different qualification style like WESG is great. However, currently I do not see team esports in the same position as other sports such as the World Cup.
Unless teams are already naturally nationally homogenous, what reason do players have to practice with a national squad? For the one or two times a year that these kinds of tournaments pop up, there is very little incentive to deviate from practice with your main roster. The prize pool was certainly prestigious, but taking part in multiple events with smaller purses is likely more appealing when you require a lot of chemistry to excel in team games. It might be possible to allow one foreign player, but then the allure of a nation-based tournament completely dissolves, in my opinion. That being said, I am not really sure how you would go about fixing this format to be better. Alibaba could just leave it the way it is, but I do not see them offering the same level of cash for the sub-Olympic quality of games that we got.
All national “issues” aside, at bare minimum, the tournament was a lot of fun. Multi-game events are always interesting for me, and in particular this event, because I follow several games pretty regularly. While I couldn’t get as much into the CSGO portion of the event because I don’t follow the random players and teams that made it to the Shanghai final, all of the Dota, Starcraft, and Hearthstone main stage games were enjoyable for me. In the second part of this blog, I’ll be talking about that more when I discuss how the event treated the media (spoiler alert: they did a great job).
(Not that I would make it through the EU qualifier after that :D)
